You may have seen my Arcade Font Engine and wanted to have such useless toys for your own magnificent site, but couldn't bring yourself to ask for the code.

Well, languish no longer! I'm hereby releasing the engine code for all interested parties, free of charge, free of encumberance. It's a single PHP script that requires only a font file to be used in any nefarious way you desire.

Note that this is the image making component, not the frivolous front-end linked above. This means you have the guts of the machine, suitable for all kinds of purposes. Basically, you can replace any text with an image made from arcade fonts and put it anywhere on your own sites.

First, you may want to view the code on pastebin.com, where you can see how marvelous my coding abilities are. Please forgive me if any part of it sucks, for I am not a programmer and this was my very first ground-up PHP creation. I'm very proud of it, but I am certain it's an inelegant, execrable desecration in the eyes of people with real coding talent.

It's heavily commented and shouldn't be hard for anyone to work into their own site.

This version adds the ability to select RANDOM fonts ( /y-r/ ) and variations ( /z-r/ ). There were some other internal changes to support this, but no functional changes. Of course, unintended changes aren't bugs, they're features!

New in this version is a secondary font folder for large fonts, so that non-8x8 fonts can be used without breaking the fontmaker. Also, this version now has default colour, font and phrase selection, to avoid screens full of errors when they're omitted from the URL.